Currently, industrial processes have an ever increasing level of automation, since only by entrusting to machines and robots the execution of the various steps of the treatment and processing of raw materials and of intermediate products is it possible to meet market demands.
In various fields of application, in fact, the market is now very large and at the same time is composed of highly demanding clients (in terms of costs and quality): automation allows to combine the various requirements, providing on a large scale and at modest costs products that comply with the required quality standards.
This situation is certainly shared by the food industry as well: in even greater detail, companies that process and distribute horticultural products on an industrial scale indeed resort to automated apparatuses and lines to handle, check, grade, package and more generally treat said horticultural products. According to known methods, some of these apparatuses are fed, at a loading station, with unsorted masses of a specific fruit (or other horticultural product), which often arrive directly from the fields.
In the loading section, adequate handling systems then transfer the products to the subsequent stations.
In greater detail, after undergoing some preliminary checks, the products are subjected one by one to the action of video cameras or similar vision systems, which analyze them and, by means of adapted software, check for each one of them the value assumed by one or more parameters of interest, such as for example color, shape and size, sugar content, ripeness, any rotting, etc.
Downstream of the video cameras, each product is then moved along a subsequent portion, which is affected by a plurality of unloading devices, which are arranged in sequence and can be operated in a mutually independent manner.
Each device faces or in any case is functionally associated with a respective collection container: for each fruit it is thus possible to activate the device that corresponds to the container in which one wishes to place it.
In this sense, the choice is indeed made as a function of the values assumed by the parameters of interest: uniform products, to be destined to packaging and distribution or to further processing steps, thus accumulate in each container.
The general structure thus outlined is adopted frequently particularly for small fruits such as cherries or blueberries, but it has drawbacks.
The check performed by the video cameras is in fact not free from problems that are not easy to solve: the great variety with which these products appear to the video cameras, as well as the variability of the surrounding (environmental) conditions in which the readings are made, sometimes prevents the correct detection of the parameters of interest, also due to technical limitations of the video cameras themselves and/or of the analysis software that has the task of processing the acquired images.
Known apparatuses therefore have adapted devices, arranged downstream of the video cameras, which retrieve the fruits for which reading is not performed, sending them back to the upstream stations, in practice subjecting them to a new cycle (trusting that the error will not reoccur).
Even in the presence of these devices, when the reprocessed fruits exceed a minimum (tolerable) threshold, as occurs for example when an unwanted negative drift in the operation of the video cameras occurs, a highly unwanted reduction of overall productivity is obtained.
The number of products delivered to the collection containers in the unit time is in fact reduced significantly, since many of the fruits initially loaded upstream are subjected to at least two treatment cycles before they are indeed delivered to the collection containers.
However, since this is an automated operation, these negative drafts are not detected promptly and the apparatus can thus operate even for a long time in non-optimal conditions.
The automated operation of the recirculation apparatus in fact allows to avoid rejects and the risk that products that are not distributed correctly end up in areas of the apparatus that are not dedicated to them, but at the same time keeps said apparatus operational even when malfunctions of the video cameras or of other stations cause low productivity, which is obviously unwelcome.
Moreover, it should be noted that in extreme conditions an excessive number of untreated fruits, due indeed to a malfunction of the upstream stations, may sometimes exceed the capacity of the recirculation apparatus, causing jamming and/or deterioration of the fruits.
These inconveniences are even more unwelcome indeed when these apparatuses or lines are designed for the treatment of blueberries.
Blueberries are in fact a substantially valuable fruit, due to their lower availability in nature, which contrasts with a high appreciation by customers, and therefore cost containment (obviously associated with the productivity of the corresponding processing line) is crucial in order to be able to offer in any case the product to the public at competitive costs, at the same time maintaining an adequate profit margin.
At the same time, this is a highly delicate fruit, which requires great care in its handling in order to avoid subjecting it to impacts: all reprocessing is therefore preferably to be avoided, indeed to reduce the risk of damaging it.